So 50 years ago I did this. Dang, I’m old…ish.

Marc was a skinny Polish-American Jew. I was a Euro-American mutt who’d decided he was Irish after playing a leprechaun in the high school musical. Our first band was clunky. If the chords to the song went, “Blum, blum, blum, blum,” the bass player would go, “Boom, boom, boom, boom” and the drummer would go, “bang, bang, bang, bang.” All skate.

The band broke up. But Marc and I started to write songs. Our favorite was a McCartney-esque paean to the day we wrote it, Thursday. There was a stage dad a few blocks away who was desperate to turn his 13 year old into a rock star. So we sold him our cast-off tunes for date money. But we refused to sell “Thursday Song.”

After a few false starts, we managed to finagle a Sicilian-American drummer named Joey into auditioning for us. We’d never heard anyone…